Managing staff schedules often feels like juggling multiple challenges, from ensuring proper coverage and avoiding conflicts to accommodating individual preferences. The Staff Scheduling Tool streamlines this process, saving time, reducing errors, and boosting team satisfaction. With features like shift assignments and easy handling of last-minute changes, it empowers managers to maintain control and keep everyone aligned. Whether managing a small team or a large workforce, this intuitive tool simplifies workforce management and ensures productivity.

The Staff Schedule Tool is exclusively available on the portal and cannot be accessed via the mobile app.

The Staff Scheduling Tool is available exclusively on the portal, allowing administrators to efficiently plan and manage staff shifts. Follow these steps to access it:

1️⃣ Log in to the Portal

2️⃣ Navigate to the Menu on the Left

3️⃣ Locate the Staff Scheduling Tool

The Staff Scheduling Tool is designed for owners and administrators to manage staff shifts effectively. Access is restricted based on role and permissions, ensuring that scheduling remains structured and location-specific.

🔹 👨‍💼 Company Owners:
✅ Have full access to view and manage the schedules of all staff across all locations.
✅ Ensure company-wide oversight and consistency in staffing.
✅ Can make necessary adjustments to maintain proper workforce distribution.

🔹 🏢 Administrators:
✅ Have full access to manage staff schedules, but only for their assigned location(s).
✅ Focus on location-specific management without interfering with schedules at other branches.
✅ Can edit, assign, and adjust shifts for staff within their designated center(s).

🚫 Owners and administrators do not have personal schedules assigned in the system.

📌 Why?

📌 What This Means:
✅ Owners and administrators can view, modify, and optimize schedules, but they will not appear as scheduled staff in shift planning.
✅ This keeps scheduling streamlined, ensuring that only staff members with assigned shifts are displayed in the system.

The Staff Scheduling Tool provides two levels of access for regular staff members, ensuring structured permissions based on their role and responsibilities.

📌 Access Scope:

📌 Permissions within this Level:

🔹 👀 View Only

🔹 ✏️ Manage

📌 Combination of Both Permissions:

📌 Access Scope:

📌 Permissions within this Level:

🔹 👀 View Only

🔹 ✏️ Manage

✅ Automatic Access to Personal Schedule:

✅ Flexible Permission Combinations:

The Daily View provides a detailed, structured snapshot of staff attendance, helping administrators monitor attendance trends, track absences, and make informed scheduling decisions.

🔹 📆 Date Picker

🔹 📊 Daily Attendance Metrics

🔹 Total Scheduled Staff

🔹 Total Attended

🔹 🤒 Total Sick

🔹 🏡 Total with Sick Children

🔹 🌴 Total on Vacation

🔹 ⚠️ Total with Forgotten Sign-Outs

The Schedule Tracking Board provides real-time status updates using easy-to-recognize icons. These symbols, displayed on the right side of the board, allow administrators to quickly assess staff availability and scheduling trends at a glance.

👩‍🏫 Scheduled: refers to staff members who have assigned shifts for the day, regardless of whether they have checked in or not.

✔️ Attended (Checked-In Staff): Indicates staff who have started their shift and are currently working.

🤒 Sick Leave: Highlights staff who are absent due to illness, allowing for quick coverage planning.

Caring for Sick Child: Indicates staff absent to care for a sick child, helping track family-related absences.

🏡 On Vacation: Marks staff who are on approved leave, preventing scheduling conflicts.

⏸️ Break: Displays staff who are currently on a scheduled break, ensuring proper shift management.

⚠️ Forgotten Sign-Out: Alerts administrators when a staff member failed to check out from their previous shift, requiring manual correction.

📅 Closing Day: Identifies planned closure days, such as holidays or professional development days, ensuring proper schedule alignment.

The Schedule Tracking Board offers a comprehensive view of each staff member’s schedule and actual attendance for the day, allowing for easy comparisons between planned shifts and real-time attendance data.

Next to each record, a progress bar provides a visual comparison of scheduled shifts and actual attendance.

The Progress Bar is a powerful tool for visualizing and comparing staff schedules with their actual attendance, making it easier to identify discrepancies and manage workforce planning effectively.

Missed Attendance Due to Sick Leave or Vacation:

The Daily View is designed to provide a comprehensive breakdown of staff attendance for a single day, allowing for a more detailed analysis of check-ins, absences, and schedule discrepancies for a day. It is ideal for long-term workforce planning and ensuring smooth operations across an entire week

In contrast, the Weekly View consolidates the entire week into a single visual board, making it easier to track staff schedules and attendance trends across multiple days without viewing each day individually.

✅ Big-Picture Scheduling: Easily assess staff availability for the entire week at a glance.
✅ Quick Attendance Comparison: Instantly see scheduled shifts versus actual attendance without scanning each day individually.
✅ Pattern Recognition: Identify recurring absences, late check-ins, or scheduling gaps over multiple days.
✅ Simplified Planning: Adjust shifts proactively to cover shortages or balance workloads.
✅ Time-Saving Navigation: Instead of clicking through daily records, get a week-long summary in one place, with the option to dive into daily details when needed.

The Weekly View is perfect for administrators who need an efficient, high-level overview before drilling down into specific days for more detailed attendance tracking and adjustments.

Now, let's dive into the structure of the Weekly View and how it organizes staff scheduling data efficiently.

At the top of the Weekly View, a date picker allows you to select a specific week to review. This enables quick navigation between different weeks for seamless scheduling and attendance tracking.

The header contains both the week number, date range, and weekdays, providing a structured overview of the selected week.

The Weekly View presents staff schedules and attendance in a structured format, allowing administrators to easily track attendance patterns, absences, and discrepancies.

The side-by-side display of Scheduled Shifts vs. Actual Attendance makes it easy to:
✅ Identify discrepancies, such as late arrivals, early departures, or missed shifts.
✅ Track attendance trends and address scheduling gaps proactively.
✅ Ensure accurate payroll calculations by comparing expected vs. actual hours worked.

By using this structured layout, administrators can efficiently monitor attendance and make real-time scheduling adjustments as needed.

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✅ Comprehensive yet compact: Displays an entire week in one structured view.
✅ Easy tracking: Allows quick identification of discrepancies between scheduled and actual attendance.
✅ Efficient scheduling management: Helps administrators spot coverage gaps and adjust staffing needs in advance.

The Weekly View ensures that managers have a clear, organized snapshot of staffing across an entire week while still allowing them to drill down into specific days when needed.

You can schedule a shift or input a staff member's actual attendance from both the Daily View and the Weekly View, depending on which is more convenient.

You can create multiple schedules for a staff member in different rooms on the same day and incorporate breaks between shifts when applicable.

📝 Note: Parent provides two different systems for applying breaks. This section covers one method, while a separate section will explain the alternative system that uses rules to calculate and apply breaks automatically.

1️⃣ Select the Room

2️⃣ Set the Start Time

3️⃣ Set the End Time

4️⃣ Add Another Schedule or a Break

5️⃣ Continue Scheduling as Needed

Recording a staff member’s actual attendance follows the same process as scheduling a shift, with one key difference:

Instead, when entering actual attendance, you only need to record the attendance pattern throughout the day without modifying the room assignments.

1️⃣ Click on the Actual Attendance Spot

2️⃣ Set the Attendance Pattern

The system automatically assumes that a scheduled break was taken, even if the staff member never took a break or took an unplanned break at a different time.

However, any unplanned breaks taken at another time are not considered legitimate breaks and are instead deducted from the total working hours.

✅ The system always deducts the scheduled break from total working hours, whether the staff member takes it or not.
✅ Unplanned breaks taken at other times are not counted as breaks but as unpaid gaps.
✅ This approach ensures work hours are recorded fairly and prevents staff from unintentionally exceeding planned hours.

This automated logic ensures accurate payroll calculations and maintains scheduling consistency, reducing the risk of overpayment or miscalculated work hours.

1️⃣ Click on the Intended Schedule or Actual Attendance Record

To Delete the Entire Schedule/Attendance

To Edit the Schedule/Attendance

You can schedule multiple staff members at once over a specific period or assign shifts to a group of staff members in a single action.

1️⃣ Click "+Schedule"

2️⃣ Select Staff Member(s)

🔹 Example:
To illustrate how the process works when scheduling for multiple staff at the same time, I have selected two staff members

When creating a bulk schedule, you need to define the start and end date, choose how often the schedule repeats, and determine how it interacts with existing schedules. Below is a step-by-step breakdown of each part of the process.

🔹 What does this mean in bulk scheduling?

You can choose how the schedule repeats over the selected period:

✅ All Weeks – The schedule repeats every week within the time frame.
✅ Odd Weeks – The schedule applies only to odd-numbered weeks (e.g., Week 1, Week 3, Week 5).
✅ Even Weeks – The schedule applies only to even-numbered weeks (e.g., Week 2, Week 4, Week 6).
✅ Pick Specific Weeks – Manually select the week numbers where the schedule should apply.

When selecting specific weeks, the week numbers correspond to the calendar year

📌 Example:

If you select only Week 6 and Week 8, the schedule will apply only during:

This ensures that the schedule repeats only on the selected weeks while considering the center’s operating days.

Choose how the new plan interacts with existing schedules:

When appending a new schedule, the system replaces existing schedules only where the new schedule overlaps, but it does not remove any other schedules on unaffected days.

✅ The new schedule will override existing shifts only for the specific days and times where it applies.
✅ Other schedules that do not fall within the new schedule’s time frame remain unchanged.
✅ This allows for partial updates without wiping out the entire existing schedule.

📌 Example Scenarios

📌 Scenario 1: Appending a Schedule That Overlaps an Existing Shift

📌 Scenario 2: Appending a Schedule Without Overlapping Existing Shifts

When Overwrite Mode is selected, all existing schedules within the selected period are completely removed and replaced with the new schedule, regardless of whether they overlap with the newly scheduled days or not.

📌 Example 1: Removing a Scheduled Shift

📌 Example 2: Replacing a Partially Scheduled Week

📌 Example 3: Removing All Shifts Within a Selected Period

The Weekly Schedule Interface provides an intuitive way to assign shifts and manage staff schedules over a selected time frame.

📌 Example:

📌 Example:

Once you click on a time slot, the schedule creation menu will open, allowing you to:

✅ Set Start and End Times for the shift/s.
✅ Assign the Staff Member to multiple rooms and shifts (if applicable).
✅ Add Breaks if needed.
✅ Choose whether to apply this schedule to all or specific days of the week.

🔄 Repeat the same process to schedule shifts for all selected staff members.

1️⃣ Verify & Submit the Schedule

2️⃣ System Warnings Based on Scheduling Mode

✅ If you have selected Overwrite, the system will detect all existing schedules, whether they overlap with the new schedule or not, and they will be erased and replaced.

Before saving, a warning notification will appear, giving you one last chance to reconsider before finalizing the changes.

✅ Append Mode Conflict Notification

3️⃣ Final Review on the Scheduling Board

After submitting, review the Scheduling Board for the scheduled period to ensure:

✅ All shifts have been correctly applied as planned.
✅ No unintended schedules were removed or modified unexpectedly.
✅ The final schedule aligns with expected working hours and staff assignments.

Want to take your staff scheduling and management to the next level? Check out these must-read resources to optimize shifts, track hours, and generate insightful reports!

🔹 ⏳ Working Hours: Tracking and Managing Staff Working Hours – Make every hour count! Learn how to monitor staff schedules, track actual working hours, and ensure accurate payroll records—because efficient time management leads to a smoother workflow.

🔹 📊 Schedule Report: Downloading & Understanding Staff Schedule Reports – Stay ahead with data-driven decisions! Discover how to generate, analyze, and interpret staff schedule reports to improve workforce planning and keep attendance records crystal clear.

💡 Explore these tools and transform your scheduling process into a well-oiled machine! ✅👩‍🏫📅